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USENIX '99 Annual Technical Conference
Table of Contents
Sunday, June 6, 1999
Full Day Tutorial Session (9:00 am - 5:00 pm):
S6   Learning Perl
Tom Christiansen, Consultant

Who should attend: Programmers with previous experience either in a structured programming language, like C, C++, Pascal, Python, or Java, or else in a scripting language like the Bourne shell, Javascript, or Tcl. While some previous exposure to Perl is beneficial, it's not essential.

Designed to be programmer-friendly and platform-neutral, Perl is a high-level, general-purpose programming language that makes easy things easy and hard things possible. Now moving into its second decade, Perl has become the language of choice across all platforms for programmers engaged in rapid prototyping, system utilities, software tools, system management tasks, database access, graphical and Web programming. Perl programming is an essential skill for any system administrator or Web programmer, and an important one for nearly everyone else.

Because Perl incorporates aspects of more than a dozen well-known UNIX tools, experienced UNIX programmers and administrators can come up to speed on Perl very rapidly. However, because Perl is portable to all major platforms, programmers and administrators everywhere will benefit from this high-powered tool.

Topics in this full-day class include:

-   Getting started with Perl, command-line switches
 
-   Debugging, common beginner "gotchas"
 
-   Control flow structures, such as loops and conditionals
 
-   Strings and numbers
 
-   Detailed description of basic data types (scalar, array, and hash variables)
 
-   Working with files and directories
 
-   Binary I/O, formatted data, records
 
-   Nested and multidimensional data structures
 
-   References
 
-   Detailed work on Perl regular expressions for pattern matching and substitution
 
-   Writing user-defined functions
 
-   Scoping issues
 
-   Signal handling
 
-   A light overview of packages, libraries, modules, and object-oriented programming in Perl
 


Tom Christiansen (S6, M6, T5 Instructor)   has over fifteen years experience in programming, administering, and teaching about UNIX and Internet systems. He has been involved with Perl since day zero of its initial public release in 1987. He is lead author on Perl Cookbook, co-author of the 2nd editions of Programming Perl, Learning Perl, and Learning Perl on Win32 Systems. Tom is also the developer of www.perl.com, major caretaker of Perl's online documentation, co-author of the Perl FAQ list, and president of The Perl Journal. Tom served two terms on the USENIX Association Board of Directors.
 


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